The Digital Dish Pit

Some professor is getting his tie in a knot because the internet is turning into a pig trough. Gary Marcus, a name that sounds like it belongs on a plaque, is wringing his hands about something he calls “AI slop.” Before that, he was trying to make “enshittification” happen, which is a hell of a word to try and say after your fifth whiskey.

Give the man credit, he’s not wrong. But getting worked up about it is like getting mad that the floor of a dive bar is sticky. What did you expect? Velvet carpets?

They’re calling it “slop.” I like that. It’s a good, honest, ugly word. It’s the gray water at the bottom of the sink after a long night. It’s the stuff you scrape off the grill before you close up. “Enshittification” sounds like a diagnosis from a doctor you can’t afford. “Slop” sounds like what you get. It’s real. It’s got texture.

So the internet, our grand bazaar of human connection and cat videos, is now flooded with machine-made garbage. Articles written by ghosts, scientific papers hallucinated by algorithms, music that sounds like a dial-up modem having a seizure. Marcus points out that it’s everywhere, from journalism to law, right down to the eulogy for your dear departed Aunt Mildred.

And the pearl-clutching about it is just beautiful. “Oh, the sanctity of science! The integrity of the written word!” The same people who’ve been selling us sugar water as a health drink and celebrity apologies as news are now shocked—shocked—to find there’s gambling in this establishment.

Let’s be honest. The internet was already 90 percent bullshit. We were already drowning in it. Motivational quotes pasted over sunsets, political manifestos written by people who move their lips when they read, top-ten lists of things you already knew. Human beings have an infinite capacity for generating nonsense. We’ve been doing it since we first figured out how to grunt at each other around a fire. All the tech wizards did was build a bigger, faster, more efficient bullshit machine. They automated the monkey cage. And now they’re upset that the whole zoo is covered in digital shit.

What did they think was going to happen? You give a machine access to the entirety of human knowledge—which includes every bad poem, every crackpot theory, every flat-out lie ever published—and you tell it to “make more.” It’s like handing a drunk the keys to the distillery and being surprised when he’s not distilling fine, single-malt scotch. He’s going to make bathtub gin, and he’s going to make a lot of it.

The real gut-puncher in all this, the part that makes me want to pour a double, is the bit about Google. Marcus nails it. Google, the company that built the engine for this whole revolution—the “Transformers,” they call them, which sounds like a toy I’m too old to care about—is now facing a world where its own invention makes its core product useless.

Their search engine, the golden goose that laid a trillion-dollar egg, works by crawling the web to find useful information. But what happens when the web is an endless ocean of AI slop? What happens when every link leads to a mirage, a slick-looking but hollow article written by a machine that thinks Africa is a country and that mixing bleach with ammonia is a great life hack?

The value of search goes to zero. It’s beautiful. It’s like inventing a universal acid and then discovering your laboratory is made of it. It’s a self-devouring snake, a perfect circle of corporate suicide. The boys in their hoodies, drunk on their own genius, built the perfect weapon and then promptly shot themselves in both feet. You have to raise a glass to that kind of spectacular, hubristic failure. It’s more human than anything their machines will ever create.

And that’s the real core of it, isn’t it? The humanity of it all. Nick Cave called AI music a “grotesque mockery of what it is to be human,” and he’s right. This slop, this digital vomit, it’s all perfectly grammatical. It’s spelled correctly. It’s formatted just so. But it’s sterile. It has no blood in it.

A human writer, a real one, sweats and bleeds over the page. He gets drunk, he makes mistakes, he falls in and out of love, he gets fired, he wakes up in a gutter with a half-remembered phone number on his hand. He writes from a place of pain and confusion and that one glimmer of hope that keeps him from swan-diving off a bridge. There’s a soul in the mess. There’s truth in the typos.

An AI has never had a hangover. It’s never stared at the ceiling at 4 a.m., wondering where it all went wrong. It’s never had its heart ripped out of its chest by a woman with sad eyes and a cruel smile. It’s never felt the quiet desperation of a silent telephone. And you expect it to write your eulogy? Fine. Let it. It’ll be a clean, well-structured summary of your data points. It won’t mention that time you got thrown out of a casino in Reno for trying to pay for chips with a library card. It won’t remember the way you laughed. It won’t be a goddamn thing.

The real distinction isn’t between true and false information anymore. It’s between the living and the dead. The slop is dead on arrival. It’s a Xerox of a Xerox of a memory. A human lie, at least, has passion behind it. A human mistake has a story. This AI crap doesn’t even have the decency to be interestingly wrong. It’s just… empty.

So let it come. Let the slop rise. Let the search engines choke on the garbage they helped create. Maybe it’ll be a good thing. Maybe it’ll force people to turn off their screens and look elsewhere. Maybe they’ll pick up a real book, with a cracked spine and yellowing pages. Maybe they’ll go to a bar and listen to an old man tell a story that’s probably not true but feels right. Maybe they’ll have to find truth in each other’s eyes instead of on a glowing rectangle.

Or maybe not. Maybe we’ll all just happily swim in the slop, mouths open, consuming the endless stream of nothing until our brains turn to the same gray mush. It’s probably easier that way.

The professor can stay on his vacation. The problem isn’t the name you call it. The problem is that we asked for it. We built the machine, we fed it our souls, and now we’re complaining about the taste.

The bottle’s half-empty, which means it’s half-full. Time for another cigarette.

Here’s to the slop. May it fertilize something real.

Source: Slopocalypse Now - by Gary Marcus - Marcus on AI